Is there some way to make discussion view the default?

I really hate the standard view for the forums and news threads that moves the most popular threads and posts to the top. Within threads, it makes almost any post after the first fiew essentially unviewable and your opinion or view is not ever seen by a single person. I always want to see posts in chronological order. Why does my opinion or comment not count just because I wasn't one of the first 10 people to reply to a thread? Often I'll add a comment to a thread and it appears to instantly vanish, when in fact it simply went to the bottom because a brand new comment obviously can't be popular yet.

I want options for both chronological and reverse chronological order, and I want to be able to set any view as the default. Oh, and fix the bug where my text goes behind the formatting buttons when my post is more than 5 lines.